Love ain't so blind

This is what my husband wakes up to in the morning.

Woof.

Retainer, Breathe Right nasal strips, wrinkles, tousled hair, bags under the eyes … it's a perfect combination of age, fatigue and weariness. And I'm not even wearing my dorky glasses.

The thing is, my husband has looked at this morning spectacle for nearly 20 years of marriage.

And he loves me anyway.

(By the way … He? Doesn't look any more glamorous than I do. And yes, I love him too. Very much.)

You might come to the conclusion, based on the evidence presented, that love is blind. After all, it was Shakespeare who gave us that phrase hundreds of years ago and it has stood the test of time.

You've heard your girlfriends proclaim it as the root of a shattered relationship: "I was blind" ... to his cheating, lying, stealing, ___ [fill in the blank].

You hear it over and over in movies, books and plays. My favorite use of the phrase is in the 2003 movie, Under the Tuscan Sun, when Mr. Martini (the wonderfully understated Vincent Riotta - swoon!) comforts brokenhearted Frances (Diane Lane) by saying it in Italian - "L'amore e cieco" - and she responds, "Oh, 'love is blind.' Yeah we have that saying too." He tells her, "Everybody has that saying because it's true everywhere."

Oh Mr. Martini, how I love you. But I gotta call bullshit on that.

(pardon my profanity ... there's just no other way to say it, folks)

I do not believe that love is blind. Love - real, true, mature, honest love - is not blind at all.

Love sees.

Love sees us, the real us. It is about more than surface attraction. It sees right through our games, lies and facades. It glares through the walls we build around us. It stares unblinking at our pettiness, our crabbiness, our inner ugliness.

Love sears into our souls, straight to our vulnerabilities, our insecurities, our fears, our hurts, our failures and disappointments.

Love takes in our beauty. Basks in our laughter. Cheers at our victories. Forgives.

Love is about acceptance, endurance. It is only with eyes wide open that we are able to fully and completely accept one another in love. We see the imperfections and love one another anyway.

Yes, we sometimes choose to look away when we suspect someone we care about could hurt or wrong us. We turn away from ugly truths. We lie to ourselves. Ignore reality. We swim in a river of denial, choosing to jump in muddy waters, rather than wade deeper through the muck toward the truth. These are choices that we make to protect ourselves. That is not the same as being blinded by love. 

And sometimes our loved ones hurt us, lie to us, deceive us. Devastating truths are revealed. Being blindsided is not the same as being blinded by love.

"Love is not a feeling; it's an ability," young Marty (Felipe Dieppa) to his girlfriend's father, Dan (Steve Carell), in the 2007 movie, Dan in Real Life.

Marty's right. To love one another - truly love one another - is a skill. It is something we are not always going to get right. But we must practice and master it with open eyes, open minds, open hearts and open arms.

Before I go, I will leave you with two things:

A less scary version of me.

And my source material for this post.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8: Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Decking the halls … already?

It's only August, but, according to a couple of news stories I came across this week, Christmas looms large and will begin its creep from the back-store shelves to front and center before the last of the Halloween candy has hit the bottom of your shopping cart.

Articles: Christmas in August as retailers rev up holiday offers from Today.com; and Halloween in August? Christmas in October? This annoying retail trend is here to stay from Time.com

Now that school has started and summer vacation past, we are in lockdown mode on spending at my house, saving up to buy gifts (and give to charity) for a holiday that's little more than four months away.

We're not the only ones. In 2012, the average US family spent almost $750 for Christmas, with about $271 of that on average per child. Here's an info graphic that shows some cool stats, including that 12 percent of consumers begin their shopping before September (yikes ... that's now, people!).

I am curious … nosy, really … What do you do? Who is on your shopping list and how much do you spend?

And if you feel tempted to rail against the commercialization of Christmas and how the real reason for the season gets lost, yadda, yadda … spare me. I'm with you. I get weary of it all too.

"For the past 50 years or so I've been getting more and more worried about Christmas. It seems we're all so busy trying to beat the other fellow in making things go faster and look shinier and cost less that Christmas and I are sort of getting lost in the shuffle." – Kris Kringle, Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

… which, by the way, was released in May of that year because the studio heads knew more people went to the movies in the summer.

Commercialization? Year 'round holiday marketing? Not new.

But the fact is, Christmas is no different than any other event: it takes time and planning to pull it off. I'm curious about how you do it, not the morality behind it. We can talk about that another time.

Or not.

So I put together a little non-scientific, confidential  online survey and ask you to please just click through and answer some easy-peasy Qs - just 10! - about holiday spending habits. I will share the results in a future blog post. Thanks!

Oh, and by the way ... 122 more days until Christmas.

Take the survey

In the kitchen with friends

"Life is a journey, not a destination." Ralph Waldo Emerson

There's a chunk of tomato in my hair.

I'm not sure how it got there, but I know where it came from: my kitchen. I canned salsa today, made from tomatoes from my garden.

My kitchen cabinet earlier today.

Adorning my kitchen windowsill in one form or another for weeks now.

In the frenzy of chopping, slicing, boiling, sealing, measuring, cooling, etc., it seems I managed to splat some tomato-y goodness in my hair. I have red hair, so who knows how long it would have stayed there, had I not smacked my noggin on the fridge door and felt my scalp for bleeding (none) and found tomato instead (lots).

I'm like a dainty princess that way.

Making and canning salsa from fresh garden goodies is an annual tradition. Plus, I am a salsa addict, especially the fresh stuff, so this keeps my cravings in check year-round. The nice thing about it today is the fact I had help in the kitchen. Lindsay, a friend and co-worker, wanted not only the yummy salsa recipe, but also to learn how to preserve it. So I invited her over this morning and we set about the fine art of preserving.

Lindsay, in my kitchen, mixing up some goodness.

Our finished product.

I was able to show Lindsay how to do this because my friend, Julie, showed me how to do so a few years ago. Julie gave our family a jar of her homemade salsa as a gift one year for Christmas and I was hooked. I made her promise to share the recipe and teach me how to preserve. She was true to her word that following summer and thus began the tradition.

Here's where Julie got the recipe that she shared with me and I, in turn, shared with Lindsay today. I have to mention I don't use hot peppers ... and that one-hour total time estimate? Wrong. It takes about three to four hours for a double batch.  

In my last post, I talked about missing the opportunity to master culinary skills from my mother, who was an amazing cook. While I cannot cook with my mom, I have been blessed to share my kitchen with good friends, as well as get to learn from them in their own kitchens. My husband? Quite the dandy cook himself and never shy from lending a hand or going full-on chef for any meal.

My husband brings home a fresh bouquet for the kitchen ... just because.

It's so nice to learn and teach in the kitchen. So nice to have someone with whom to split the workload and clean-up. Yes, the meal - or in today's case, the salsa - is the final destination, but the journey is one of conversation, listening, sharing, planning, laughter.

Oh sure, sometimes you get tomatoes in your hair.

Still, it is a journey best taken with good friends and those you love.

Learning to cook

"There is no sincerer love than a love of food." - George Bernard Shaw

My mom was a good cook.

Actually, that's not true. She was an amazing cook.

That is no exaggeration. You would be amazed - utterly, wholly amazed - at how delicious her fried chicken was. From the crispy crunch of the spicy battered skin, to the tender, moist meat itself, this bird was above and beyond the stuff you were buying in a bucket. The regulars she fed at the little diners where she worked often wondered how that petite spitfire could conjure such gratifying meals day after day.

It was her gift.

It was a gift, however, I didn't care to receive. At least not in my youth.

I loved and appreciated my mother's cooking - and so did all my friends - but I also saw what a chore and burden it was. Mom worked hard and she came home exhausted from being on her feet all day, standing over steam tables, with grills and ovens raging in the background. Her creativity was met with little in the form of wages, as is often the case with an artist. And there were always dishes to be washed, counters disinfected, ovens wiped. After cooking all day, she turned around and whipped up amazing (yes, amazing) dinners on a nightly basis at home. And, again, there were always dishes to be washed, counters disinfected, ovens wiped.

This was not appealing to me. So she taught my siblings how to cook, but I didn't seek her tutelage.

And then she was gone.

With her went not only the technical knowledge - the chemistry of flavor and measurement and preparation - but also the feelings ... the love that she infused into each act ...  for that was truly the essence of her cooking. You see, her gift was not just the ability to cook the food, but it was the gift of sharing - the food, herself, her heart, her soul. She served love every day and every night.

So here I am in my 40s, teaching myself how to cook. I could always make the basics with no complaints from my crew here; both my husband and son have rather bland culinary tastes. But as I've matured, I've yearned to extend more heart into what I prepare. I better understand what cooking meant to my mother because it is beginning to mean something to me beyond sustenance. The preparation is less a chore and more a labor of love. Love that is meant to be shared.

I pretty much use a trial-and-error method, experimenting with recipes and then tweaking them to suit my tastes.

My version of chicken tortilla soup. Chicken, rice, salsa, corn - served with tortilla chips.

I cannot call my mom and ask for advice; cannot hand her a spoon for a nibble to see if the sauce needs more garlic; cannot serve her a meal on simple Corelle dishes as she did for me so very many times.

But I can honor her memory by preparing each meal with heart, sharing not only food, but also the gift that comes from the love of giving to others.

"Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all." - Harriet Van Horne

Smile, dammit

Family pictures ... hate 'em.

Really, I do.

In case you are wondering why, let me offer evidence:

Exhibit A, where I'm not sure if the camera is on. It was.

Exhibit B, emerging sneeze/itchy nose.

Exhibit C, with puppy photo bomb.

Exhibit D, where we just stopped trying and gave up with half my face and the top of Hubs head cut off.

Granted, these are selfies on the couch with poor lighting and dumb t-shirts. Yet, I thought it would be fun to bring it in for an impromptu family pic of the Three Amigos ... the Three Musketeers ... heck, even the Three Stooges.

And that's where it all goes wrong: we just can't always naturally pull it together very well for pics of us all together, at the same time.

It's not that we're unhappy or hideous people. We're a pretty cute trio with a dash of whimsy about us. But something - or someone - always goes wrong.

• Hubs closes his eyes. Because, apparently he is afraid the flash will steal his soul through his eyes if he leaves them open for a picture. He denies it, but photographic evidence would suggest otherwise.
• Kiddo smiles, but if it takes too long, he begins to clench his teeth, ala, "I can't wait to lock these two old farts away in a home." 
• I'm pretty adorable most of the time. (I mean, come on - these dimples - amiright?) Unless I laugh or the photographer is at eye level with me, and then about seven chins unfold and I look like Jabba the Hut.

Bears a striking resemblance.

But the thing is, we need family pictures. It's important to capture these stages in our lives together, even if they are awkward. Terribly, terribly awkward. These are memories, people, and we need to capture them ... even if it's in a trap and we are trying to chew our leg off to get away.

So last weekend, we had the mother of all family portraits: the church directory. It's like the yearbook of your adult life and you gotta bring it; you gotta look good: smiling, happy, peaceful, content and a little holy wouldn't hurt. If people wonder, "Hey, who's that awesome family in the fifth pew?" - they look it up in the church directory and right there we are, being awesome.

And so I went about coordinating outfits. I would wear a white tank and light teal cardi (of course!); Hubs, a golf shirt in a darker shade of teal; and Kiddo, a white golf shirt. Adorbs! And appropriately awesome.

Long story short, here's how it went down Saturday morning: Hubs' shirt had a snag mid-belly. Kiddo had a black smudged stain of unknown origin on his white shirt. My outfit was cute, but I had an unrelated emotional meltdown and cried. That's not a good look for me. Think toddler art with red finger paints - that's what my splotchy complexion looked like.

Hubs and I argued in the car on the way there. Kiddo sulked. This was not the making of a good picture for the church directory. We risk being known as the Grumpy McGrumpersons in Tattered Clothing.

I tried to think of something to say that could perk everyone up. As we pulled into the church parking lot, all I had was:

"Just smile, dammit."

And we did.

We faked it. Because some days you are not awesome or adorbs, but you put on a smile and get through it. And we did. Together. The three of us. And somehow, that makes it better.

It's not the best picture of the Malones. But if someone wonders who that family in the fifth pew is, they can look us up and see three smiling faces.

Because, if nothing else, we smiled ... dammit.

First day of school

I am not in high school.

Nope. I graduated a long (long) time ago. But boy, have I been nervous about the first day of freshman year ... actually my son's first day of his freshman year.

Intellectually I know there is nothing to worry about: the schedule is set, the fees paid, pens and paper purchased, class picture already taken (they do this at registration - genius!). My son is prepared and looking forward to it.

Me?

I'm a wreck.

Emotionally, I am having a harder-than-expected time with this transition.

Don't get me wrong: I love school. I dig the routine. I like that this year our school system has implemented for the first time a balanced school year, meaning they go back to school earlier, but get two-week breaks in the fall, winter and spring. I'm looking forward to marching band competitions and seeing my kid thrive in the new environment.

Still?

I'm a wreck.

Maybe it's because the first day of Kindergarten seemed like it was yesterday.

And now?

(I take his first day of school pics in the same spot every year)

It all seemed to happen overnight.

But I also think my anxiety stems from the fact that high school is a whole new deal. It's where a whole lot of what makes you a grown-up takes shape. This is no time to back off on the parenting. It's about to get real, folks.

So here is a letter to my son, shared with you with his permission:

***

Dear Son -

 

Today is your first day of high school. I have the utmost confidence in your ability to do great things with this opportunity. You totally got this.

 

Time is getting ready to move in fast-forward for all three of us and I want to be sure to get some thoughts, advice and expectations down for you, even though I know you know these things. We've talked about them, but they bear repeating ... in writing.

 

In no particular order:

Your dad and I expect you to follow all the old rules: be kind, be polite, forgive, be patient, be respectful.

Don't ever let another person or group of people determine your self-worth. Stand tall.

You are nice guy and a handsome guy. Girls are going to like you (as we already know). Don't manipulate their attention or feelings to inflate your ego. 

Hold off on swearing as long as you can. It belies your intelligence and becomes a vulgar habit that's a real bitch to kick. Just ask me.

We are not cool parents. Smoking, drinking alcohol and drugs are all illegal. We expect you to comply with that. No exceptions.

With that being said ... don't ever get in the car with someone who has been drinking or doing drugs. Ever. Call us and we will come get you, no matter where you are, no questions asked. Actually scratch that last part: we are going to ask a lot of questions. But you won't get in trouble. Promise.

Your dad and I are going to meet all of your new friends ... and their parents. Even if that horrifies you.

Experience the moment whenever you can. Like I said, time is going to fly, so take it all in.  Really listen to the cheers as you exit the field after a band performance instead of hurrying off; remember a favorite song and what you were doing when you heard it. Stuff like that sticks with you. 

Help others, but remember: you cannot fix people or save them. If a friend is in real trouble, tell your dad. He was a social worker for more than 20 years, and even though he has changed fields, he still knows how to help.

There are times when we are not going to get along. You may be really, genuinely pissed at your dad and me. That's normal and it doesn't mean we don't still love one another ... but be cool about it, young man. Respect.

Have patience with your dad and me. We're going to get things wrong; make mistakes. We might hover too much or put too much responsibility on you. We're figuring it out as we go. We don't expect you to fully understand our perspective until you have kids of your own.

... And for the love of God, make sure that is a a very, very long time from now!

 

Have a great first day of high school and enjoy it!

xoxo - Mom 

 

***